Life during Wartime: Emotions and the Development of ACT UP
In: Mobilization: the international quarterly review of social movement research, Volume 7, Issue 2, p. 177-200
ISSN: 1086-671X
Focusing on the street AIDS activist movement ACT UP, this article explores the question of social movement sustainability. Emotions figure centrally in two ways. First, I argue that the emotion work of movements, largely ignored by scholars, is vital to their ability to develop & thrive over time. I investigate the ways AIDS activists nourished & extended an "emotional common sense" that was amenable to their brand of street activism, exploring, eg, the ways in which ACT UP marshaled grief & tethered it to anger; reoriented the object of gay pride away from community stoicism & toward gay sexual difference & militant activism; transformed the subject & object of shame from gay shame about homosexuality to government shame about its negligent response to AIDS; & gave birth to a new "queer" identity that joined the new emotional common sense, militant politics, & sex-radicalism into a compelling package that helped to sustain the movement. Second, I investigate the emotions generated in the heat of the action that also helped the street AIDS activist movement flourish into the early 1990s. 63 References. Adapted from the source document.